David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 157 will arrive on Friday, June 28.
APPETIZER (Reviews: All is
True and The Biggest Little Farm)
All is True
Opening with the fiery incineration of London’s Globe
Theatre in 1613, Kenneth Branagh’s All is
True depicts, via known facts and artful imagination, the three years of
Shakespeare’s retirement. The movie finds its Will and its way, although vocally
Shakespearean only in snatches. True to Branagh’s crisp modern voice, speaking
is clear and quotation rather spare. After his wandering years as playwright
and actor-manager, Will was 49 on final return to Stratford-upon-Avon. Country
wife Anne (born Hathaway) was 57. Branagh is 58, while Anne is played by Judi
Dench, 84 (be glad that he didn’t cast American star Anne Hathaway, 36). Dame
Judi does a sly, outspoken and lovable job as the deeply nested and illiterate spouse of England’s most astonishing
poet.
Because Shakespeare is also literature’s great honey
hive of speculation, Branagh and writer Ben Elton feed their conjectural appetite. Missing his theater but now
proudly a small-town squire, Will tends his garden and savors his handsome house
(the atmosphere is all leafy sunlight and Tudor candlelight). Often he broods
about his only son, Hamnet, dead at 11 in 1596, believing the eager boy had his
literary fire (no thought is given to the crushing weight of such a singular inheritance).
Poor Hamnet becomes a looking glass into Will’s fretful soul, now living in the
smaller world of his wife and two grown daughters, rising Puritanism, village
envy, old gossip and current scandal. Anne and the acerbic, unmarried daughter Judith
(fine Kathryn Wilde) crackle with feminist resentment, which seems centuries
premature (Shakespeare’s “feminis”" plays were comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew). However shape-shifting
the biographical truths may be (and must be), the vivid sincerity of performed truth serves Branagh’s deep devotion
to his hero without camp or pomp.
This pensive but not pedantic tribute includes a
magical sequence. Old mentor Henry, now the aged third Earl of Southampton (Ian
McKellen), deigns to visit Will. Decades before the young (and social-climbing)
poet enshrined Henry’s youthful beauty (however Platonically poetic some of the
lines strike modern ears as gay). Conversing before a warm fireplace, the awed but
also condescending nobleman listens to Will recite his immortal “fortune and
men’s eyes” lines from sonnet 29. Though greatly moved, Henry snobbishly
reminds the genius that he remains a commoner, one who purchased a family crest
or 20 pounds. In a wizard’s touch Branagh then has McKellen recite the same
lines in his posher, more cultivated voice, which opens thed profound nobility
of the words. The earl now lives through the bard. The writer’s bloodline would
die out fairly soon, but his name and art are crowning crest of English itself.
The Biggest Little Farm
Before there was Big Pharma (drugs, meds etc.) there
was Big Farm, the agro industry that gobbled up most little farms while big
cities absorbed most family farmers. The pleasing rebuke to that is The Biggest Little Farm, a sort of
green-thumbed Babe about a real farm
and farmers and critters. The enlightened
dirt movers are John and Molly Chester, who made an Eden of balanced, organic
agriculture, including at least nine billion micro-organisms, out of 213
drought-baked acres north of L.A.
Do we detect a little Disney DNA? The buoyant pair, a
poster couple of can-do naturalism, left secure jobs as a prize-winning
cameraman (John) and health-minded chef (Molly). Their sentimental motive was
to keep rescued dog Todd, whose barking provoked their 2011 eviction from a Santa
Monica apartment. The Chesters turned parched brown into verdant green with
help from gifts, interns and two rooted Chicano workers. Their Prospero of
permaculture was Alan York, a practical dreamer with an axiom about animals:
“Their poop is our gold.” York’s less-is-not-more
advice proved sound through seasonal trials by fire and wind, swarming snails
and hungry coyotes. Rebuilt soil and restored orchards become a teeming stage
for a bucolic riot of ducks, chickens, sheep, dogs, goats, cows, bees and the extravagantly
maternal swine Emma.
It’s The Good
Earth submitting to the Whole Earth
Catalog, echoing Dryden’s praise of Chaucer: “Here is God’s plenty.” The cornucopian
movie shortcuts some sweat labor and mostly ignores vegetable gardens, yet we feel fully enlisted. John Chester directed
and, opting to show rather than lecture, led the photo team’s superb harvest, rooted in a unified synergy of film and farm. The long, patient production was
in symbiotic sync with the land, now a brand and banquet called Apricot Lane
Farms.
SALAD (A List)
12 Effective
Movies About Famous Writers:
Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, 2005), A Quiet Passion (Cynthia Nixon as Emily
Dickinson, 2016), Before Night Falls
(Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas, 2000), Wilde
(Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde, 1997), Tales
of Ordinary Madness (Ben Gazzara as “Serking”/Charles Bukowski, 1981), Bright Star (Ben Whishaw as John Keats,
2009), Shakespeare in Love (Joseph
Fiennes as Shakespeare, 1998), Neruda
(Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, 2016), Trumbo
(Brian Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, 2015), Mrs.
Parker and the Vicious Circle (Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker,
1995), The Gambler (Michael Gambon as
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1997) and The Last
Station (Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, 2009).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles often played corrupt, domineering men but gave them a bold life force of
sensual humanity. He “preferred to think of Falstaff as ‘a Christmas tree
decorated with vices.’ He saw those vices, which he shared, as virtues
according to another moral code (and) chose to overlook Macbeth’s crimes by
calling him ‘a great man who likes good wine.’ Greatness and goodness are alike
humanized by the possession of a hearty appetite.” Orson’s creative gluttony
also fed a gourmandizing appetite, and corpulence. (Quote from Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Jack
Nicholson broke through to stardom as a dissolute Southern lawyer in Easy Rider. Matthew McConaughey’s big
break was canny Dixie lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill, “a meaty melodrama of the kind that can rocket an
actor up. Bourbon-smooth but no lush, Brigance was a star platform. McConaughey
pulled off an instinctive performance, and steadied his nerves for the
courtroom climax with a big party the night before. He avoided being devoured
by Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, earned $200,000 and never forgot the
opening: ‘Overnight from Friday to Sunday I became a ‘movie star.’ From Friday,
being an observer, to Monday being the one observed.” (From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising, easily available from
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Jake
Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) is a smart lawyer rising in A Time to Kill (Warner Bros. 1996; director Joel Schumacher,
photography by Peter Menzies Jr.).
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